Roundup: Historian's Take
This is where we place excerpts by historians writing about the news. On occasion this page also includes political scientists, economists, and law professors who write about history. We may from time to time even include English profs.
Amitai Etzioni, professor of sociology at George Washington University, in the LAT (April 26, 2004):
Fast-forward three years. A bipartisan commission is conducting hearings in Washington to determine why we were asleep at the wheel when terrorists set off a nuclear device in one of our major cities. The attack killed 300,000. It shook the nation's confidence so profoundly that the Constitution was"temporarily" suspended; all civil liberties were waived to prevent future attacks.
The new commission has established that one of the reasons we failed to prevent this tragedy was the impact of an earlier commission and an earlier set of hearings: the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, a.k.a. the 9/11 commission.
The problem was that the 9/11 investigation spent too much time assigning blame and looking backward. When it came to recommending safeguards for the future, it encouraged the public, federal agencies and the White House to plan for the kinds of attacks we had faced in the past rather than foreseeing dangers to come. It unwittingly contributed to a malaise that military historians have long studied: fighting the last war rather than preparing for the next one.
Could a mere congressional commission really have such a long-reaching effect? Indeed. A similar set of hearings spelled the end of the McCarthy era. Another drove Richard Nixon out of office and led to campaign finance reform. And the Church Commission, which found that the FBI improperly spied on domestic dissenters during the 1960s, strengthened the wall between the FBI and the CIA -- the same wall that is now under attack for its role in our 9/11 failures.
Consider the buzz emerging from the 9/11 commission now. In reaction to our intelligence miscues, it's pushing public opinion toward approving something like an American MI5, a domestic spying agency similar to Britain's. By highlighting Bush's inattention to terrorism before Sept. 11, it is no doubt abetting an administration desire to recoup politically by dispatching Osama Bin Laden before the elections. These actions might have merit, but they don't block the gravest of the foreseeable dangers posed by terrorism -- nuclear weapons.
In much the same way, our current anti-terrorist strategies also miss the point. Because airplanes were the previous weapon of choice, we've earmarked $5.17 billion in 2005 (out of $5.3 billion budgeted for the Transportation Security Administration) for airports. Now that trains have been attacked in Madrid, we are moving to better protect the rails. But we seem to ignore that Al Qaeda rarely attacks twice in the same way or in the same place.
We're also spending billions trying to eliminate terrorists -- in Afghanistan, in the Philippines and Indonesia, in Colombia and in Europe -- before they can hit us. This could be effective, but it is also exceedingly difficult. Terrorists are mobile, hidden and often protected by local populations. And there seems to be an unending supply of fresh recruits for every cell we take out....
As for preventing terrorists from getting their hands on nuclear weapons, it's a strategy that by comparison gets little attention and few resources. Approximately $1 billion is set aside for the purpose, just one-fifth of what we're spending to find shoe bombs, box cutters and nail clippers at airports. (Eliminating chemical and biological weapons is also important but less so, because those agents are much more difficult to weaponize and employ than nuclear material.)
Yet the nuclear threat can be met. The number of nuclear devices floating around on the black market is limited. The number of sites where they are poorly protected is small and well known. The list of experts who might illicitly develop nuclear weapons is relatively short.
The 9/11 commission, which is charged not just with investigating the past but preparing us for the future, should fix this strategic imbalance. It should recommend a substantial budget increase for the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, which provides for the supervised destruction of nuclear weapons, the removal of"loose" plutonium from global circulation, and alternative training and employment of nuclear weapons scientists.
Posted on: Friday, April 30, 2004 - 12:46
Cass Sunstein, in the New Yorker (May 3, 2004):
... In September of 1953, just before Brown was to be reargued, [Chief Justice] Vinson died of a heart attack, and everything changed. “This is the first indication that I have ever had that there is a God,” [Justice Felix] Frankfurter told a former law clerk. President Eisenhower replaced Vinson with Earl Warren, then the governor of California, who had extraordinary political skills and personal warmth, along with a deep commitment to social justice. Through a combination of determination, compromise, charm, and intense work with the other justices (including visits to the hospital bed of an ailing Robert Jackson), Warren engineered something that might have seemed impossible the year before: a unanimous opinion overruling Plessy. Thurgood Marshall, a principal architect of the litigation strategy that led to Brown, recalled, “I was so happy I was numb.” He predicted that school segregation would be entirely stamped out within five years.
That’s how Brown looked fifty years ago. Not everyone thinks that it has aged well. Many progressives now argue that its importance has been greatly overstated—that social forces and political pressures, far more than federal judges, were responsible for the demise of segregation. Certainly, Brown has disappointed those who hoped that it would give black Americans equal educational opportunities. Some scholars on the left even question whether Brown was rightly decided. The experience of the past half century suggests that the Court cannot produce social reform on its own, and that judges are unlikely to challenge an established social consensus. But experience has also underlined Brown’s enduring importance. To understand all this, we need to step back a bit.
A quiz: In 1960, on the sixth anniversary of the Brown decision, how many of the 1.4 million African-American children in the Deep South states of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina attended racially mixed schools? Answer: Zero. Even in 1964, a decade after Brown, more than ninety-eight per cent of African-American children in the South attended segregated schools. As Klarman shows in his magnificent “From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality” (Oxford; $35), the Court, on its own, brought about little desegregation, above all because it lacked the power to overcome local resistance.
Not that it made any unambiguous effort to do so. In the 1954 decision, the Court declined to specify the appropriate remedy for school segregation, asking instead for further arguments about it. The following year, in an opinion known as Brown v. Board of Education II, the Court declared that the transition to integration must occur “with all deliberate speed.” Perhaps fearing that an order for immediate desegregation would result in school closings and violence, the justices held that lower-court judges could certainly consider administrative problems; delays would be acceptable. As Marshall later told the legal historian Dennis Hutchinson, “In 1954, I was delirious. What a victory! I thought I was the smartest lawyer in the entire world. In 1955, I was shattered. They gave us nothing and then told us to work for it. I thought I was the dumbest Negro in the United States.” As a Supreme Court justice, Marshall—for whom I clerked in 1980—liked to say, “I’ve finally figured out what ‘all deliberate speed’ means. It means ‘slow.’”
Real desegregation began only when the democratic process demanded it—through the 1964 Civil Rights Act and aggressive enforcement by the Department of Justice, which threatened to deny federal funds to segregated school systems. But Klarman doesn’t claim that Brown was irrelevant to the desegregation struggle. In his view, the decision catalyzed the passage of civil-rights legislation by, in effect, heightening the contradictions: inspiring Southern blacks to challenge segregation—and Southern whites to defend it—more aggressively than they otherwise would have. Before Brown, he shows, Southern politics was dominated by moderate Democrats, who generally downplayed racial conflicts. The Brown ruling radicalized Southern politics practically overnight, and in a way that has had lasting consequences for American politics....
Posted on: Friday, April 30, 2004 - 11:43
Richard Rorty, who teaches philosophy at Stanford, in the London Review of Books (April 2004):
Europe is coming to grips with the fact that al-Qaeda's opponent is the West, not just America. The interior ministers of the EU nations have been holding meetings to co-ordinate anti-terrorist measures. The outcome of these meetings is likely to determine how many of their civil liberties Europeans will have to sacrifice.
We can be grateful that the recent terrorist attack in Madrid involved only conventional explosives. Within a year or two, suitcase-sized nuclear weapons may be commercially available. Eager customers will include not only rich playboys like Osama bin Laden but the leaders of various irredentist movements that have metamorphosed into well-financed criminal gangs. Once such weapons are used in Europe, whatever measures the interior ministers have previously agreed to propose will seem inadequate. They will hold another meeting, at which they will agree on more draconian measures.
If terrorists do get their hands on nuclear weapons, the most momentous result will not be the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. It will be the fact that all the democracies will have to place themselves on a permanent war footing.
The measures their governments will consider it necessary to impose are likely to bring about the end of many of the socio-political institutions that emerged in Europe and North America in the past two centuries. They may return the West to something like feudalism.
The actions of the Bush Administration since September 11 have caused many Americans to think of the war on terrorism as potentially more dangerous than terrorism itself, even if it entailed nuclear explosions in many Western cities. If the direct effects of terrorism were all we had to worry about, their thinking goes, there would be no reason to fear that democratic institutions would not survive. After all, equivalent amounts of death and destruction caused by natural disasters would not threaten those institutions. If there were a sudden shift of tectonic plates that caused skyscrapers to collapse all around the Pacific Rim, hundreds of thousands of people would die within minutes. But the emergency powers claimed by governments would be temporary and local.
Yet if much less severe damage occurred as a result of terrorism, the officials charged with national security, those who bear the responsibility for preventing further attacks, will probably think it necessary to end the rule of law, as well as the responsiveness of governments to public opinion. Politicians and bureaucrats will strive to outdo one another in proposing outrageous measures. The rage felt when immense suffering is caused by human agency rather than by forces of nature will probably lead the public to accept these measures.
The result would not be a fascist putsch, but rather a cascade of government actions that would, in the course of a few years, bring about a fundamental change in the conditions of social life in the West.
The courts would be brushed aside, and the judiciary would lose its independence. Regional military commanders would be given the kind of authority that once belonged to locally elected officials. The media would be coerced into leaving protests against government decisions unreported.
Fear of such developments is, of course, more common among Americans like me than among Europeans. For it is only in the US that the Government has proclaimed a permanent state of war, and had that claim taken seriously by the citizens. Christopher Hitchens has jeeringly said that many American leftists are more afraid of Attorney-General John Ashcroft than they are of Osama bin Laden. I am exactly the sort of person Hitchens has in mind. Ever since the White House rammed the USA Patriot Act through Congress, I have spent more time worrying about what my Government will do than about what the terrorists will do.
The Patriot Act was a very complex omnium gatherum, hundreds of pages long. Like its British analogue, the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act, it was rushed through after September 11. Both pieces of legislation were probably drawn up simply by asking the security agencies to list the restrictions they found most inconvenient. We shall soon learn whether the Madrid bombings trigger the same sort of reaction by all or most of the governments of the EU.
I don't think the Bush Administration is filled with power-hungry crypto-fascists. Neither are the German or Spanish or British governments. But I do think the end of the rule of law could come about almost inadvertently through the sheer momentum of the institutional changes that are likely to be made in the name of the war on terrorism.
If there were a dozen successful terrorist attacks on European capitals, and if some of them used nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, the military and the national security bureaucracies in all the European countries would, almost inevitably, be granted powers that they had not previously wielded.
The public would find this fitting and proper. Local police forces would probably start working on instructions from the national capital. Any criticism by the media would be seen by the government as a source of aid and comfort to terrorism. European ministers of justice would echo Ashcroft's reply to critics of the Patriot Act."To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty," Ashcroft said,"my message is this: your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve."...
In a worst-case scenario, historians will someday have to explain why the golden age of Western democracy lasted only about 200 years. The saddest pages in their books are likely to be those in which they describe how the citizens of the democracies, by their craven acquiescence in government secrecy, helped bring the disaster on themselves.
Posted on: Thursday, April 29, 2004 - 20:23
Sandra Mackey, author of The Reckoning: Iraq and the Legacy of Saddam Hussein, in the NYT (April 29, 2004):
The United States is in a no-win situation in Falluja. Yesterday, fighting increased in and around the city of 300,000, the place where four civilian contractors were burned to death last month. Even if American forces storm and subdue the town, it is unlikely that there will be peace there anytime soon.
It didn't have to be this way. Had the United States taken more time to understand the city — a place where even Saddam Hussein ventured cautiously — it might have been able to avoid the current showdown. Part of the misunderstanding can be seen in the way the Pentagon talks about the situation in Falluja, describing those holed up there as either die-hards of Saddam Hussein's regime or foreigners promoting the ideology of Al Qaeda. What the Pentagon is neglecting is a third group, one that could prove more deadly to the occupation: the tribes of central Iraq. They are a tough lot with a long history of resistance to any outside authority.
Those tribes grew out of necessity. For hundreds of years, the people of the high desert north and west of Baghdad survived waves of conquerors by joining with their kin for defense. When the Ottomans arrived in the 16th century, Istanbul co-opted the tribes of Falluja and the Sunni Triangle rather than conquer them. They were left alone to herd their flocks, till their land and govern their own affairs within an empire glued together by orthodox Islam. When the British became the masters of Iraq at the end of World War I, the tribes revolted rather than submit to non-Muslim foreign rule. The British quelled the uprising but never gained control of the tribes. The monarchy that ruled from 1921 to 1958 spent much of its time and energy working to keep the tribes in check with grants of land and other financial incentives. But Baghdad succeeded only in renting the tribes around Falluja, not buying them.
That changed briefly, from 1963 to 1966, when Gen. Abdul Salam Arif literally governed Iraq through his own praetorian guard within the military. Its members protected him not because of any political program but simply because, like them, he belonged to the Jumaila tribe, which has its roots in the area around Falluja. As Arif's town, Falluja was tied to the leader, not the state.
When he took over Iraq, Saddam Hussein, a member of the Bu Nasir tribe, replicated Arif's model in his own tribal homeland, Tikrit. But the Jumaila were outside his bounds of kinship, and he never trusted the tribesmen of Falluja as he did his own kin. The Bu Nasir and those closely allied with them made up Mr. Hussein's elite Republican Guard and security services. Most of Falluja's tribesmen went into the regular armed forces, and no one from Falluja was part of Mr. Hussein's inner circle.
But because Mr. Hussein harbored a prudent fear of Falluja's tribesmen, he gave them perks. The government invested heavily in construction projects. Tribal leaders were paid off with allowances. The national police looked the other way as tribe members ran smuggling operations. But like his predecessors apart from Arif, Mr. Hussein never fully won their loyalty.
One of the great unanswered questions about the Bush administration's rush to war is whether the tribes on which Saddam Hussein was dependent but could not totally control might have been wooed away from him in the months leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It is a question that can never be answered. Now it is the American occupation that the tribes of Falluja resist.
Posted on: Thursday, April 29, 2004 - 19:54
A new poll shows that as of mid-March, 57% of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein had given substantial support to al-Qaeda. Worse, 45% actually say that" clear evidence" has been found in Iraq to support this allegation! As for weapons of mass destruction 45 percent say they believe Saddam had them before the recent war, and 22 percent say that he had a major program for developing them.
There is no documentary or physical evidence for any of these assertions.
The only good thing about the poll is that it showed that a majority of Americans now believes the Iraq war will not bring greater peace and stability to the Middle East (56% did believe it in May 2003), and 51% believe that Iraqis want US troops out of their country (this may actually be overly simplistic).
The poll was commissioned by the ' University of Maryland's Program in International Policy Attitudes, conducted by Knowledge Networks from March 16 to 22, was released yesterday. It surveyed 1,311 adults and had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points. '
Why would so many Americans cling to patently false beliefs? One can only speculate of course. But I would suggest that the two-party system in the US has produced a two-party epistemology. Epistemology is the study of how we know what we know. If it were accepted that Saddam had virtually nothing to do with al-Qaeda, that he had no weapons of mass destruction (nor any significant programs for producing them), and that no evidence for such things has been uncovered after the US and its allies have had a year to comb through Baath documents-- if all that is accepted, then President Bush's credibility would suffer. For his partisans, it is absolutely crucial that the president retain his credibility. Therefore, rather than face reality, they re-jigger it to create a fantasy world in which Saddam and Usamah are buddies (as in the Jimmy Fallon/ Horatio Sanz skits on the American comedy show, Saturday Night Live), and in which David Kay (of whom respondents say they've never heard) never recanted his earlier belief that the WMD was there somewhere.
Of those who maintain that Iraq actually did have WMD, 72% say they are going to vote for Bush.
If 57% of Americans believe that Saddam was supporting Usama in the late 1990s through 2003, it means that not insignificant numbers of Democrats believe this. It shows that the Democratic party leadership has not developed an effective critique of Bush administration approaches to the 'war on terror,' and that in effect the Republicans are poaching on Democratic territory successfully in this regard.
It is bad for the country for policy to be made based on falsehoods, and it is even worse for failed policies not be be recognized as such because the public clings to myths.
I saw how the mythical opinions are generated at the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations where I testified last Tuesday. Former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger testified, and began his testimony with a long quote from Usama Bin Laden about how the US was timid and had easily been chased out of Lebanon and Aden with a few bombs. It was an odd way to begin a hearing on what has gone wrong in Iraq.
I don't have my degree in Neocon studies, but as I thought about this, it occurred to me that Schlesinger must count as one of the early Neocons, having gone over to Nixon at a time when the junior members of the club still clustered around Democrat Scoop Jackson. As a historian, I respect several of Schlesinger's achievements, and I know for a fact that he was very suspicious of Nixon during Watergate and put in safeguards against Nixon going to the officer corps and trying to declare martial law. But it is also clear that Schlesinger has what can charitably be called blind spots on the Middle East. During the oil crisis of the 1970s, British official Lord Cromer became alarmed at his views: ' But it was the substance of Schlesinger's remarks which set alarm bells ringing."[One] outcome of the Middle East crisis," he told Lord Cromer,"was the [sight] of industrialised nations being continuously submitted to [the] whims of under-populated, under-developed countries, particularly [those in the] Middle East."Schlesinger did not draw any specific conclusion from this but the unspoken assumption came through ... that it might not ... be possible to rule out a more direct application of military force". ' That is, he was at least talking about invading Saudi Arabia and occupying its oil fields, and he appears to have had rather dismissive views of Middle Easterners. (The area is not under-populated, by the way; the Middle East if we include from Morocco to Iran, and Turkey to Saudi Arabia, surely has a population comparable to that of the US). And, after the recent Iraq war, Schlesinger seemed to argue that no Arab would ever again lift a hand against the United States, since they had been taught a decisive lesson.
So it seems clear to me that Schlesinger was trying to shape his Senate testimony so as to hint around that the Iraq War was somehow connected to al-Qaeda, even though we all know that it wasn't. The only one who challenged Schlesinger on this was Rhode Island Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee:
' SEN. CHAFEE: I know these gentlemen have good opinions, but they don't speak for the administration. Those are the people we're going to get the answers from ultimately. But nonetheless, Secretary Schlesinger, in your opening comments, you quoted some very chilling testimony from Osama bin Laden. Why use that testimony at a hearing on Iraq?
MR. SCHLESINGER: The mention of that is to discuss why it is that the United States is engaged in the Middle East, because we were attacked, because of a declaration of war against Americans.
The question of Iraq, which is what you point to, it may or may not have been, as some stated, central at the time we went in. It may have been secondary or peripheral at the time we went in. But the administration is quite right that it is now the central front in the war against terrorism, because much of what we see in Fallujah today are terrorists who have come from the outside world. They are the ones primarily who have been setting the car bombs and have been doing the training.
So it has now become central, even for those who might, at the outset, not have thought it central.
SEN. CHAFEE: Well, it's become central because we invaded. But certainly I think you'd even agree there's never been any connection between Osama bin Laden and Iraq. They're very, very different issues. And Afghanistan is --
MR. SCHLESINGER: Well, I think you've had --
SEN. CHAFEE: -- a long way from Iraq.
MR. SCHLESINGER: I think you've had testimony, or a letter, at least, from George Tenet talking about the contacts between al Qaeda and Saddam going back at least a decade. But that is -- we are there. We are where we are. And the consequences of not winning, of not being successful, would be disastrous not only for the United States --
SEN. CHAFEE: I agree with that, but I don't think there's any connection with al Qaeda. We're there and now we have to be successful. I agree with that. '
Actually, George Tenet has testified that there was no relation between Saddam and 9/11. What is interesting here is how completely honest and aboveboard Chafee was being, in taking on the Neocon Consensus. That consensus has been adopted by the Right of the Republican Party as its election playbook, and it is repeated on Fox Cable News, on rightwing talk radio, at Republican fundraisers, dinners, and in television interviews all through the Red States. So far the Republican Right has been able to keep its partisans with it on these matters. You might think that a Republican like Chafee standing up for the truth is a good sign. And it is, of course, in some ways. But the Associated Press worries that centrist Republicans like Chafee and Spector are a"dying breed."
Still, that Senator Lugar agreed with ranking minority Senator Biden to hold the hearings at all was clearly an expression of extreme anxiety about where Iraq policy is going and about the potential catastrophe that lies ahead if his party cannot begin facing facts. (Biden has been courageous and straightforward that we are in big trouble; Lugar tends to signal it in more low-key ways). Senator Hagel clearly also has severe concerns. The Democrats, not being obliged to try to reelect a sitting president, in general are more clear-sighted on the problems right now, but many of the Republicans are also clearly alarmed. There wasn't much partisanship at the hearings, since after all, Iraq affects all Americans. The only exception was Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, who seemed angry about the hearings and kept throwing leading questions only at Richard Perle. It seems clear that the momentum of the Republican Party at the moment is in the hands of the Brownbacks and the Santorums, and it is they who are shaping opinion among the rank and file, aided by the Limbaugh megaphone.
If nearly half the country cannot even see that things are going badly wrong in Iraq, one despairs that anyone will work up the political will to try to fix the problems before it is too late.
Posted on: Wednesday, April 28, 2004 - 21:32
D.M. Giangreco and Kathryn Moore, in the Kansas City Star (April 25, 2004):
Dear Bill & Ted:
You are wrong when you say that the American people will "throw out" George W. Bush if the war is not "won" in the next five months.
Forget what you see in the polls. The American people have no history of getting rid of their presidents in the middle of a war. They certainly did not throw out LBJ --- he lost his nerve and quit. And Nixon? He was reelected as U.S. casualties were in a steep downswing due to the "Vietnamization" policy that saw all-causes deaths drop from 16,508 in 1968 to 551 in 1972. As for Lincoln and Roosevelt, they were both reelected in spite of the fact that their far bloodier wars saw pronounced jumps in casualties during the run-ups to the elections of 1864 and 1944. Roosevelt’s campaign in particular was held in the middle of a year-long "casualty surge" that saw an average of 65,000 young Americans die each and every month from June 1944 thru May 1945.
Your comments to the contrary, Americans have never made one of their leaders "toast" during the middle of a fight. Of course, President Bush can always propel himself into becoming the first by not speaking firmly about how he plans to handle things in Iraq. But despite the focus of the press last week, when trying to lead him to take an Alcoholics Anonymous approach from denial through redemption re his "fault" for 9/11, the plans Bush outlined in his speech seemed pretty specific to us.
The Iraqi Governing Council has approved a timetable which calls for 1) holding elections for a national assembly no later than January 2005; 2) the elected assembly will draft a new, permanent constitution which will be presented to the Iraqi people in a national referendum to be held the following October; and 3) elections for a permanent government will be held two months later on December 15, 2005.
President Bush’s MO is clearly to hold the Iraqis’ feet to the fire on this timetable and he maintains that the election of 2005 will "mark the completion of Iraq's transition from dictatorship to freedom." I suspect that he means what he says. The alternative is some fuzzy reliance on an undefined UN effort to "help" us. Interestingly, none of the reporter’s at the press conference displayed even the slightest interest in the Administration’s plans beyond this June.
It will be the job of President Bush to reach beyond the pack journalism of the elite news outlets to make sure that Americans, the Iraqis --- and the terrorists --- understand that Iraq will not be allowed to be a an open sore.
Posted on: Monday, April 26, 2004 - 14:58
Juan Cole, in his blog (April 23, 2004):
A reader sent me these questions that he said Christopher Hitchens had posed. I then found them at his web site. They are:
1) Do you believe that a confrontation with Saddam Hussein's regime was
inevitable or not?
2) Do you believe that a confrontation with an Uday/Qusay regime would
have been better?
3) Do you know that Saddam's envoys were trying to buy a weapons
production line off the shelf from North Korea (vide the Kay report) as
late as last March?
4) Why do you think Saddam offered"succor" (Mr. Clarke's word) to the
man most wanted in the 1993 bombings in New York?
5) Would you have been in favor of lifting the"no fly zones" over
northern and southern Iraq; a 10-year prolongation of the original"Gulf
War"?
6) Were you content to have Kurdish and Shiite resistance fighters do all
the fighting for us?
7) Do you think that the timing of a confrontation should have been left,
as it was in the past, for Baghdad to choose?
My reply would be simple. If you are arguing for war, you don't have to ask all these fancy questions. There are really only two questions you have to answer. The first is, would you yourself be willing to die fighting for this cause you have espoused? The second is, would you be willing to see your 18-year-old son or daughter killed for this cause? (I do not ask if you would be glad or satisfied; I ask if you would be willing).
My answer with regard to the aftermath of September 11 and defeating al-Qaeda in Afghanistan is, yes, I would have been willing to go fight and die myself to protect my country from another such attack. And, had my son been of age and had he enlisted after September 11, I could have accepted that and everything it entailed.
With regard to Iraq, the answer to both questions in my case is"no." I would not have been willing to risk my own life to dislodge Saddam Hussein from power. And, I would certainly not have been willing to see my son risk his, nor would I like to see him ever sent to Iraq as a draftee, because I believe the entire aftermath of the war has been handled with gross incompetence, and I certainly don't want my flesh and blood mauled by the machinations of Richard Perle and his buddies.
With regard to Mr. Hitchens's questions, most of them are logical fallacies, of the same form as"have you stopped beating your wife?" There are some questions that are traps. For instance, there are many reasons for which Saddam might have harbored one person wanted in connection with the first world trade center bombing that are not particularly sinister. It certainly is untrue that Saddam had anything to do with that bombing. It was done by al-Qaeda. The question is a trick because it tries to lead the reader in a particular direction, even though the evidence does not.
Likewise, ' Do you think that the timing of a confrontation should have been left, as it was in the past, for Baghdad to choose? ' is further tautology. The question is posed in such a way as to make the reader accept that there must have been a" confrontation" between the Baath military and the US. Gen. Zinni thought there would never have been any such thing, and that Saddam was contained. Gen. Zinni is not a milquetoast. Iraq had a weak army, a paralyzed command structure, rusting equipment, and could not even hold out in its own country against the US for more than a few days when the US launched a" confrontation." So the question can be rejected, since there may never have been such a confrontation. And, if there was, it seems obvious that the US could always win it hands down. That being the case, the US was never in any danger from the Saddam regime, which was a toothless old lion with rheumatoid arthritis and bad breath.
These word games are inconsequential. Do you, Abraham-like, offer up your first-born at this altar? That's what nearly a thousand US military families have done with regard to deaths, and thousands more with regard to permanent maimings and cripplings, and what yet thousands more are likely to be asked to do. If it had been me, I wouldn't have ordered them to do it, not in Iraq.
Another question we could throw back at Mr. Hitchens (who, it seems to me, isn't actually doing much for the war effort in Iraq), is whether, if you could only capture one, would you rather have Saddam Hussein in custody, or Usama Bin Laden? Given what we know Usama is planning, I opt for putting all our efforts and I mean all our efforts into capturing him tout de suite. Chasing around Iraq after Salafis and Mahdists doesn't make the homeland even one whit safer.
Posted on: Friday, April 23, 2004 - 13:24
Jonathan Zimmerman (New York University), in the LAT (April 23, 2004):
Seventeen years ago, as a social studies teacher in Baltimore, I led a class of sixth-graders through a lesson on the civil rights movement. We had just reached the 1963 March on Washington when one asked a question that I hadn't expected. "Is it true," she asked, "that Martin Luther King cheated on his wife?" Yes, I replied, and then I explained how we knew it was true: The Federal Bureau of Investigation bugged King's hotel rooms.
"Why," another student asked, "would the FBI do a thing like that?" It wasn't hard for this highly diverse group of kids — mostly African American and white, with a sprinkling of Latinos and Asians — to come to an answer. By challenging segregation, King threatened the very root of white supremacy in the United States. "So, he was an enemy of the state!" one student concluded. Yes, I said. That's exactly what he was.
The next day, I received a call from an irate African American parent. "My daughter's feeling very upset," the parent said. "You've taken away her hero, her role model." Several other black parents called the principal, who summoned me to his office for a stern warning: Stick to the textbook, or else.
Suffice to say that the textbook didn't have anything bad to say about Martin Luther King — or about anyone, really. The book presented Americans in all of their wondrous racial and ethnic diversity, highlighting the contributions of notable minorities to politics, literature, athletics and the arts. But each group in society remained pure, pristine, immaculate, unblemished.
How did we get here? Why do schools teach history as a pageant of diverse "heroes" and "role models," a multicultural Hall of Fame? Partly it's an American thing: We tend to see the world without a lot of subtlety or moral ambiguity. We like our heroes heroic, not muddled.
But it also reflects the American postwar embrace of psychology, which has become our dominant idiom for thinking, talking and knowing. This emphasis on the individual psyche was highlighted in, among other places, Brown vs. Board of Education, the landmark decision that the Supreme Court handed down 50 years ago this spring.
Listen to the language of Brown: "To separate [black children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone." In other words, segregation is wrong because it hurts black self-esteem.
Here the court cited new "psychological knowledge," starting with research by the renowned Harlem psychiatrist Kenneth B. Clark. In a series of experiments conducted with his wife, Mamie, Clark showed that African American children preferred white dolls and pictures to black ones.
By the 1960s, African Americans and their liberal white allies would use the same rationale for desegregating American history textbooks: Black kids needed to "see themselves" in the books or their self-esteem would suffer.
"We have no way of knowing how many potential Negro scientists, scholars, doctors, teachers and businessmen have been swept into the ditch of oblivion by the psychological backlash of the Negro history gap," cautioned Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1967.
Up until this time, we should remember, most American history books either denigrated or ignored African Americans. In the South, textbooks called slavery a benevolent institution, and Northern books were little better, depicting slaves as childlike victims who morphed into marauding savages during Reconstruction. Today, our students no longer read such racist drivel in school; instead, they learn about great African Americans like Martin Luther King. This reform is one of the great achievements of that same history.
But these gains came at a cost. For whenever a new racial luminary moved into our textbooks, he — or, increasingly, she — also moved beyond reproach.
Minority students needed unblemished heroes, the argument went, to feel good about themselves. Who cares if King cheated on his wife? Good kids must have role models, after all. And all role models must be good.
So textbooks depicted the evils of slavery at great length, but rarely mentioned that Africans practiced it themselves. The books tempered their descriptions of Indian massacres by the Spanish Conquistadors, lest Latino students take offense. And so on.
Before long, of course, whites began complaining that accounts of slavery and racial violence harmed their kids' fragile minds. "Education is getting a positive image about oneself," fumed a white Michigan parent in 1974, condemning a textbook that described white attacks upon blacks during the Chicago Race Riot of 1919. "No child, white or black, will get a positive image by reading about stabbings, war, the problems." Once Brown enshrined self-esteem as the highest American value, in short, an honest American history became impossible.
To understand history, students must do more than simply "see themselves" in it; they need to grapple with its enigmas, its ambiguities and its inconsistencies. But they'll never do that if we're overeager to protect their psyches, which are far less delicate than most adults suspect.
Let me be clear: I regard Brown vs. Board of Education as one of the triumphs
of U.S. history, but the psychological presumptions of Brown have prevented
an honest exploration of that history. Nothing in our past is purely good or
bad — not even Brown vs. Board of Education.
Posted on: Friday, April 23, 2004 - 11:38
Frederick Clarkson, author of Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy, in the Christian Science Monitor (April 21, 2004):
Was the United States founded as a "Christian nation"? For many conservative Christians there is no question about it. In fact, this is one of the primary ideas animating and informing the Christian right in the US. We are likely to hear a great deal about it this election year - thanks to Roy Moore, the former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, who is at the center of a national campaign to alter the course of history. Depending on whom you talk to, Mr. Moore is alternately a hero, a crackpot, or a demagogue....
On one front, leaders on the Christian Right are organizing Ten Commandments rallies across the country. The charismatic Moore is often the headliner. A recent rally in Dallas drew 5,000 people. Meanwhile in Congress, US Rep. Robert Aderholt (R) and Sen. Richard Shelby (R), both of Alabama, have introduced a bill (written by Moore and his lawyer) that would remove jurisdiction from the federal courts over all matters involving the "acknowledgement of God" in the public arena, including school prayer, the pledge of allegiance, and the posting of the Ten Commandments in public buildings. The Constitution Restoration Act would be retroactive, apparently to undo many federal and Supreme Court decisions - such as Moore's case.
While the bill is unlikely to pass this year, it does suggest the emerging contours of the debate.
Although Moore's movement has gained some political traction, its core premise has a fundamental flaw: It aims to "restore" a Christian constitution that never existed. And this presents challenges for Moore and his allies as they attempt to invoke the framers of the Constitution in support of their contemporary notions of a Biblically based society.
Last August, for example, James Dobson, head of Focus on the Family, rallied with Moore in front of the Alabama state courthouse.
"I checked yesterday with my research team," Dr. Dobson announced. "There are only two references to religion in the Constitution." The first, from the preamble, he said, refers to securing "the blessings of liberty," which, he asserted, "came from God" (although there is nothing in the document to support that view.) The other was the First Amendment's establishment clause that, he said, "has given such occasion for mischief by the Supreme Court."
However, Dobson's researchers missed - or ignored - Article Six of the Constitution. That's the one barring religious tests for public office and set in motion disestablishment of the Christian churches that had served as arbiters of colonial citizenship and government for 150 years.
Mainstream historian Gary Wills writes that the framers' major innovation was "disestablishment."
"No other government in the history of the world," he writes, "had launched itself without the help of officially recognized gods and their state connected ministers."
Christian Right historian Gary North agrees. The ratification of the Constitution was a "judicial break with Christian America." Article Six provided a "legal barrier to Christian theocracy" leading "directly to the rise of religious pluralism," he declares in "Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism." Indeed, history shows that the framers of the Constitution sought to establish religious equality among citizens and in government. But, as Christian nationalists seek to eviscerate the capacity of federal courts to protect the religious freedom and equality of all Americans, we can expect that one of their main tactics and goals will continue to be the revision of history itself.
Posted on: Thursday, April 22, 2004 - 21:49
Martin Kramer, on his blog (April 21, 2004):
... The public hasn't yet fixed blame for the on-the-ground problems that have beset the United States. But some of it could easily settle upon the academy, for failing to prepare this country for its mission despite almost fifty years of federal subsidies for area studies. That would make Title VI a tempting target for retribution. Lots of people in the academy have rushed to compare Iraq to Vietnam. Whatever you think of the comparison, remember this outcome of the Vietnam war: Richard Nixon zero-budgeted Title VI. In his 1970 budget message, Nixon called the program"outmoded." It was saved by Congress, but its budget was halved.
Paradoxically, a campaign to cut Title VI funding would meet less resistance than the present campaign on behalf of H.R. 3077. The academics have framed their agitation against the bill opportunistically, as a defense of academic freedom against the alleged horrors of an advisory board. This has gotten them the support of a whole range of off-campus activists who just love to pose as champions of free speech. After all, that's how the ACLU justifies its existence and raises its own funds. But you can be sure that these same activists wouldn't lift a finger to defend academe's subsidies against appropriations cuts, if there were no matter of supposed principle at stake. After all, Harvard and Princeton aren't starving. Title VI now supports seventeen federally-funded Middle East centers, more than at any time in history. If Congress decided to cut that number to twelve or ten, would the ACLU send an impassioned letter to the Hill (as it did against H.R. 3077)? The answer is a pretty obvious"no."
But surely, you say, Congress wouldn't cut budgets for international studies at a time of growing American need. I don't think Congress would completely defund Title VI, but that's where alternatives come into play. Take the National Security Education Program (NSEP), which was established following the Kuwait war. It gives scholarships to students in return for a commitment to government service. It's now running a pilot of the National Flagship Language Initiative, a new approach to producing graduates with advanced levels of language proficiency. Until now, the NSEP has operated out of a trust fund created by a one-time appropriation in 1991. But the fund is depleted, and the NSEP will have to go to annual appropriations if it's going to survive. The figure that's out there is $20 million a year. That could easily be shaved off the $90 million that now go to Title VI; such a cut would only set Title VI back to where it was before 9/11.
I could go on and on with other alternatives, but you get the idea. Title VI is vulnerable. Paradoxically, an advisory board appointed by Congress could provide the program with a built-in tripwire against defunding initiatives, and lock Congress into the reform approach. But many academics, especially the more radical ones, either can't see it, or think they can kill the board but keep the money. To judge from our straw poll, that's a very risky assumption. Were H.R. 3077 to be defeated or gutted, it's easy to imagine Title VI with no board, less money, and an uncertain future. And if Iraq turns out badly, it's easy to imagine a Congress angry enough to create alternatives at the expense of Title VI, so that America will be ready next time.
Posted on: Thursday, April 22, 2004 - 14:51
Niall Ferguson, in the NYT (April 18, 2004):
From Ted Kennedy to the cover of Newsweek, we are being warned that Iraq has turned into a quagmire, George W. Bush's Vietnam. Learning from history is well and good, but such talk illustrates the dangers of learning from the wrong history. To understand what is going on in Iraq today, Americans need to go back to 1920, not 1970. And they need to get over the American inhibition about learning from non-American history.
President Bush, too, seems to miss the point. "We're not an imperial power," he insisted in his press conference on Tuesday. Trouble is, what he is trying to do in Iraq — and what is going wrong — look uncannily familiar to anyone who knows some British imperial history. Iraq had the distinction of being one of our last and shortest-lived colonies. This isn't 'Nam II — it's a rerun of the British experience of compromised colonization. When Mr. Bush met Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain on Friday, the uninvited guest at the press conference — which touched not only on Iraq but also on Palestine, Cyprus and even Northern Ireland — was the ghost of empire past.
First, let's dispense with Vietnam. In South Vietnam, the United States was propping up an existing government, whereas in Iraq it has attempted outright "regime change," just as Britain did at the end of World War I by driving the Ottoman Turks out of the country. "Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators," declared Gen. Frederick Stanley Maude — a line that could equally well have come from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld this time last year. By the summer of 1920, however, the self-styled liberators faced a full-blown revolt.
A revolt against colonial rule is not the same as a war. Vietnam was a war. Although the American presence grew gradually, it reached a peak of nearly half a million troops by the end of the 1960's; altogether 3.4 million service personnel served in the Southeast Asian theater. By comparison, there are just 134,000 American troops in Iraq today — almost as many men as the British had in Iraq in 1920. Then as now, the enemy consisted of undisciplined militias. There were no regular army forces helping them the way the North Vietnamese supported the Vietcong.
What lessons can Americans learn from the revolt of 1920? The first is that this crisis was almost inevitable. The anti-British revolt began in May, six months after a referendum — in practice, a round of consultation with tribal leaders — on the country's future and just after the announcement that Iraq would become a League of Nations "mandate" under British trusteeship rather than continue under colonial rule. In other words, neither consultation with Iraqis nor the promise of internationalization sufficed to avert an uprising — a fact that should give pause to those, like Senator John Kerry, who push for a handover to the United Nations.
Then as now, the insurrection had religious origins and leaders, but it soon transcended the country's ancient ethnic and sectarian divisions. The first anti-British demonstrations were in the mosques of Baghdad. But the violence quickly spread to the Shiite holy city of Karbala, where British rule was denounced by Ayatollah Muhammad Taqi al-Shirazi — perhaps the historical counterpart of today's Shiite firebrand, Moktada al-Sadr. The revolt stretched as far north as the Kurdish city of Kirkuk and as far south as Samawah, where British forces were trapped (and where Japanese troops, facing a hostage crisis, were holed up last week).
Then, as now, the rebels systematically sought to disrupt the occupiers' communications — then by attacking railways and telegraph lines, today by ambushing convoys. British troops and civilians were besieged, just as hostages are being held today. Then as now, much of the violence was more symbolic than strategically significant — British bodies were mutilated, much as American bodies were at Falluja. By August of 1920 the situation was so desperate that the general in charge appealed to London not only for reinforcements but also for chemical weapons (mustard gas bombs or shells), though these turned out to be unavailable.
And this brings us to the second lesson the United States needs to learn from the British experience. Putting this rebellion down will require severity. In 1920, the British eventually ended the rebellion through a combination of aerial bombardment and punitive village-burning expeditions. It was not pretty. Even Winston Churchill, then the minister responsible for the air force, was shocked by the actions of some trigger-happy pilots and vengeful ground troops. And despite their overwhelming technological superiority, British forces still suffered more than 2,000 dead and wounded....
The lessons of empire are not the kind of lessons Americans like to learn. It's more comforting to go on denying that America is in the empire business. But the time has come to get real. Iraqis themselves will be the biggest losers if the United States cuts and runs. Fear of the wrong quagmire could consign them to a terrible hell.
Posted on: Wednesday, April 21, 2004 - 19:12
Allison Kennedy, in the Columbus Ledger Enquirer (April 20, 2004):
A renowned historian and author of books and other materials about the Holocaust presented lectures Monday in observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day, which was Sunday.
Encouraging his audience to learn from history, Richard Rubenstein of the University of Bridgeport, Conn., compared lessons from the Holocaust to contemporary terrorism. ...
In his 45-minute lecture,"Auschwitz, Catastrophic Terrorism and the Clash of Civilizations," Rubenstein warned against religious extremism. He criticized Hitler for being a Christian extremist, and he also sees terrorist acts fueled by Muslim extremists to be a warped path to an all-Islamic culture.
He added that Muslim terrorist bombings in the United States, Israel and Spain are committing genocide just as Hitler did -- a common thread being a spiritual reward after death.
But soon after Sept. 11, many Muslims around the world including leaders from the Columbus Islamic Center said the airplane hijackers hitting New York's twin towers weren't true Muslims at all.
"What's all this fueled by?" Rubenstein asked rhetorically. Answering his own question, he said there's enormous resentment, comparing it to Germany's mentality following World War I. Hitler wanted a world fashioned in his own image, as suicide bombers hope to accomplish.
Posted on: Tuesday, April 20, 2004 - 22:36
Daniel Pipes, in the NY Sun (April 20, 2004):
A day after Israeli troops killed its second leader within a single month, the Islamist terrorist organization Hamas put on a brave face. The Israelis"are dreaming" if they think this would weaken Hamas, announced Ismail Haniyeh to a crowd of over 70,000 mourners at the funeral for Abdel Aziz Rantisi."Every time a martyr falls," Haniyeh insisted,"Hamas is strengthened."
This sort of boosterism and puffery has a long history among Palestinians. The last time Israeli forces did real damage to the Palestinian war machine, in May 2002, for example, Khaled Meshaal of Hamas announced that the Israeli devastation was actually"a Palestinian victory that lifted the morale of our people." Not to be outdone, Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian Authority (P.A.) claimed that same month,"The more destruction I see, the stronger I get."
These leaders may be fooling themselves by pretending that defeat is victory, but growing numbers of Palestinians are wising up to the bitter realities of losing a war. Their mood has darkened since February 2001, when the prime minister, Ariel Sharon, came to office intent to establish that violence against Israel does not work.
The results have deeply affected Palestinian life. In one town of 5,000 on the West Bank, a resident told the Times of London how his town has been"isolated from the whole world, even from other villages. Everybody has to be in their homes by 6 p.m., and the Israeli patrols come around every day to check."
Protracted isolation has led to steep economic decline. Recent P.A. figures show that 84% of the Palestinian population lives in poverty, as defined by the World Bank, four times the number that did so before the Palestinians stepped up the violence in late 2000. P.A. residents number 3.5 million and their economy produces $2.5 billion a year, meaning the average per capita income is $700 a year.
A World Bank study in 2003 found that investment in the P.A. declined to $140 million in 2002 from about $1.5 billion in 1999. The United Nations found in 2003 that Palestinians have turned to subsistence agriculture — growing their own food — in place of the more sophisticated work they had previously been doing.
Commenting on the situation, the U.N. special envoy to the region, Terje Roed-Larsen, describes the Palestinian economy as"devastated."
(That said, conditions should not be exaggerated. Foreign aid adds $800 million a year, bringing annual per capita income to about $1,000 — or about the same as Syria and higher than India and all but a few sub-Saharan countries. Palestinians are thus by no means the poorest people in the world.)
In a word, Mr. Sharon's tough policies have established that terrorism damages Palestinian interests even more than it does Israeli ones. This has led some analysts deeply hostile to Israel to recognize that the"second intifada" was a grievous error. Violence"just went haywire," says Sari Nusseibeh, president of Al-Quds University. An"unmitigated disaster," journalist Graham Usher calls it a" crime against the Palestinian people," adds an Arab diplomat.
After the execution of Hamas's other leader, Ahmed Yassin, last month, 60 prominent Palestinians urged restraint in a newspaper ad, arguing that violence would provoke strong Israeli responses that would obstruct aspirations to build an independent"Palestine." Instead, the signatories called for"a peaceful, wise intifada."
Ordinary Palestinians, too, are drawing the salutary conclusion that murdering Israelis brings them no benefits."We wasted three years for nothing, this uprising didn't accomplish anything," says Mahar Tarhir, 25, an aluminum-store owner." Anger and disillusionment have replaced the fighting spirit that once propelled the Palestinian movement," finds Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, a reporter for Knight Ridder.
As for Israelis, as early as July 2003 the military brass reached the conclusion that Israel was achieving victory. More sharply, Israeli analyst Asher Susser concluded in the Middle East Quarterly back then that the Palestinian effort to break the Israeli spirit through terror"has failed" and resorting to force"was a catastrophic mistake, the worst the Palestinians have made since 1948."
In this context, rapidly eliminating two Hamas chieftains in a row deepens Palestinian perceptions that Israel's will to defend itself is strong, its military arm long, and that terrorism is tactically wrong. Perhaps more Palestinians will realize the time has come to accept the existence of the Jewish state.
Posted on: Tuesday, April 20, 2004 - 22:10
Peter Schrag, in the Mercury News (April 18, 200):
For the ever-ebullient Kevin Starr, who retired almost three weeks ago as California's state librarian, optimism about his native state is second nature, the view almost as grand as it was a decade ago when he took the job. And as California's premier social and cultural historian, he's as entitled to it as anyone.
Even when Starr talks about the latter-day ``intellectual impoverishment'' of California's leadership, or the ``time-out'' in support of the state's once celebrated public programs and policies, it sounds as if he regards the enervation as little more than a passing thing.
Why, he asked the other day, is there no grand vision? Where are the Clark Kerrs, the Earl Warrens, the Phil Burtons, the scholars, the visionary writers, the people who, in this period of crisis, can ``rebuild the California narrative?'' Why is ``the Democratic Party (his party) brain-dead?'' As a poor boy growing up in San Francisco a half-century ago, he ``struggled for the optimistic view of life,'' a view that was nurtured by ``the larger California impetus.'' Now, he says, he's less optimistic about California than he used to be -- finds fewer people to share or sustain his optimism.
Yet almost in the same breath, the tone changes. There are the writers Richard Rodriguez and Gregory Rodriguez (no relation), who are thinking about California's new demographics and its emerging culture in new ways. There is the political maturity of a new generation of Latino politicians who -- contrary to the warnings of anti-immigration nativists -- are not irredentists seeking to retake lost Mexican soil. And, of course, there's Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The state, he says, is fortunate to have Schwarzenegger -- a most improbable governor -- who ``has the state moving again.'' Like many others who have dealt with Schwarzenegger, including a lot of Democrats, he finds him smart, a good listener, ``not the Terminator . . . but quiet and good-humored. . . . Arnold wants to be great.''
Schwarzenegger, he said, really is trying to re-establish bipartisanship in Sacramento, ``trying to build up the self-esteem of the Legislature.'' (That statement was made just before the governor, declaring that legislators wasted too much time on trivia, called for a return to a part-time Legislature.)...
Posted on: Monday, April 19, 2004 - 22:33
Juan Cole, in his blog (week of April 12, 2004):
I have concluded that the Bush administration is like Iran. The Iranian
government has two of everything. It has a relatively liberal president,
and a hardline supreme jurisprudent. The reformists control the foreign
ministry, the hardliners control the military. The reformists have some
parliament representatives, the hardliners control the Guardian Council,
which has the power of judicial review over parliament. You never know with
the Iranian government who is on top or what a policy means, since it could
be coming from either competing section of the same government.
Likewise, in the Bush administration, the Pentagon has its own foreign
policy, which competes with and often trumps the foreign policy of the
State Department and the National Security Council. Thus, Gen. Myers is
pointing fingers at Iran and Syria and making all sorts of wild accusations
at them, darkly hinting they will be overthrown if they don't shape up. And
Colin Powell is writing them polite letters about bilateral relations and
could they please use their good offices to help the Americans in Iraq. It
is bizarre, and the urbane, canny leaders in Damascus and Tehran (who have
long experience of residence in the UK and Germany respectively), must be
scratching their heads in wonder at this Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde American
hyperpower that rages about an axis of evil and goes about preemptively
invading countries on the one hand and then comes politely, hat in hand, to
request selfless assistance on the other.
****
The frustrating thing for a historian is that when you craft narratives of
19th century power struggles, you have the memos of the principals in the
archives, and you have some sense of who supported whom and why. Reading
current Iraq events through the dark glass of the Arabic press and hints
coming out of the CPA is a much chancier endeavor.
****
The unemployment rate is still very high
among Shiites in the south. The Great Depression in the US was defined by
an unemployment rate of about 25%. That among Iraqis is much higher,
perhaps still twice that in a lot of places. Those who complain about the
proliferation of militias should remember that militiamen get stipends, and
joining one is often a way to make some desperately needed money. Higher
employment would make such dangerous work less appealing. Despite the
bright promises of American rule, sewage still flows in the streets in the
Shiite slums, and there often is not clean drinking water. Most important
of all, the Americans promised democracy, but have consistently shut down
attempts to have free and fair elections, even (for the most part) at the
municipal level. (John Bourne's experiment with open municipal elections in
the small towns around Nasiriyah is a praiseworthy exception, but it is an
exception). There is a growing fear that the Americans intend to turn the
country over to their corrupt cronies, such as fraudster Ahmad Chalabi, and
there will be a new, neo-colonial"soft" dictatorship like that in Egypt
(also a regime propped up by the Americans).
Posted on: Monday, April 19, 2004 - 22:05
Juan Cole, in his blog (April 14, 2004):
I saw President Bush's news conference Tuesday evening. He said many things
that disturbed me, not in any partisan sort of way (and I continue to
maintain that simple partisanship makes for bad analysis), but on grounds
of ethics and clear thinking and democratic values. I got the transcript
and began arguing back, but could see it could go on for hours. And
probably others would do a better job. But, since bytes are cheap, I may as
well post what I put down; this is a diary of sorts, after all.
' THE PRESIDENT: [Referring to the analogy between Iraq and Vietnam] I think the analogy is false. I also happen to think that
analogy sends the wrong message to our troops, and sends the wrong message
to the enemy. '
If a historical analogy is offered as a cautionary tale or a form of
analysis of a contemporary situation, it has to be judged on its own
merits. Making such analogies is a form of democratic discourse, and it is
the sort of thing that the Bill of Rights meant to protect when it said
that the government shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. To
say that bringing it up"sends the wrong message to our troops" and to"the
enemy" is to attempt to prevent democratic discourse on the grounds that it
affects the morale of the democratic country's fighting forces and that it
might give encouragement to those they with whom they are at war.
But the troops are either fighting for democratic values or they are not.
If they are, then it is illogical to demand that the Republic forsake
democratic discourse because they are fighting for it. It would be like
saying that all Americans should turn in their firearms during the war, or
that Americans should cease worshipping in the religion of their choice
during the war. It is precisely the ability of American citizens to analyze
the nature of the war freely that the troops are defending. Moreover, the
"enemy" (though who exactly that is is unclear at the moment) is fighting
for his own reasons, and can hardly take any real comfort from the
existence of free and democratic discourse in the United States.
' A secure and free Iraq is an historic opportunity to change the world and
make America more secure. A free Iraq in the midst of the Middle East will
have incredible change . . . '
This premise is not necessarily true. Turkey has had relatively democratic
elections since 1950, but this development had no resonances in the rest of
the Middle East. Iran went theocratic in 1979, and Khomeini expected
everyone in the Middle East to follow suit. No one did. Saudi Arabia is
among the world's richest monarchies, but it has not spread monarchy in the
mainly republican Middle East. Middle Eastern countries are often fairly
insular with regard to politics, and every tub is on its own bottom. There
is no guarantee that a"free" and democratic Iraq will have any real
influence on the rest of the region.
At the moment, moreover, Iraq is a poster child for dictatorship. Any
Egyptian who looked at what has transpired there in the past year might
well decide that the soft dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak is altogether
preferable to taking the risk of opening up the system and possibly causing
a similar social breakdown!
' There's no question it's been a tough, tough series of weeks for the
American people. It's been really tough for the families. I understand
that. It's been tough on this administration. But we're doing the right
thing. . .. '
I find the equation of the way in which the loss of nearly 80 US troops and
the wounding of dozens has been"tough" on the American people, and the way
in which these events have been"tough" for the Bush administration to be
in bad taste.
Saddam Hussein was a threat.
It is difficult to see how a ruler whose army was so easy to defeat, and
who was reduced to hiding in a spider hole, was a threat to the United States.
' He was a threat because he had used weapons of mass destruction on his
own people. '
I should think this proves he was a threat to his own people.
' He was a threat because he coddled terrorists. '
I don't know what this means, to" coddle" terrorists. Either he sponsored
terrorist actions aimed at harming the United States directly, or he did
not. He probably did not, after 1993. The State Department did not even
list Iraq as a terrorist threat in recent years.
' He was a threat because he funded suiciders. '
Saddam Hussein never gave any real support to the Palestinian cause, and he
did not pay suicide bombers to blow themselves up. It is alleged that he
funneled money to the orphans of such suicide bombers, but I have never
seen any documentation for the claim. Supporting orphans is in any case not
the same as funding terrorism.
' He was a threat to the region. He was a threat to the United States. '
I can't see how, given the state of his military in 2003.
' That's the assessment that I made from the intelligence, the assessment
that Congress made from the intelligence; that's the exact same assessment
that the United Nations Security Council made with the intelligence. '
Key figures of the Bush administration, including the President, Vice
President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and National Security
Adviser Condi Rice consistently misled the Congress by intimating or
stating over and over again that Iraq was close to having nuclear weapons,
that it had weapons of mass destruction, and that it was responsible for
September 11 and had strong ties to al-Qaeda.
All of these allegations were completely false. Having stampeded Congress
into a hasty vote on the war in Iraq with this farrago of phantasies, to
now use Congress's acquiescence as proof that Iraq was dangerous is frankly
dishonest.
' I went to the U.N., as you might recall, and said, either you take care
of him, or we will. Any time an American President says, if you don't, we
will, we better be prepared to. And I was prepared to. I thought it was
important for the United Nations Security Council that when it says
something, it means something, for the sake of security in the world. '
So then would it not be equally important, if the Security Council said
"no" to a war, for that decision to be upheld by the United States? When it
says something, after all, it should mean something, for the sake of
security in the world.
' See, the war on terror had changed the calculations. We needed to work
with people. People needed to come together to work. And, therefore, empty
words would embolden the actions of those who are willing to kill
indiscriminately. '
I can't understand what this string of Bushisms could possibly mean. If
Bush needed to work with people, why did he blow off the Security Council
in March of 2003? If people needed to come together to work, wouldn't they
need to come together about launching a major war that affected the entire
world? Why then did Bush go to war virtually unilaterally (bilaterally at
most)? That wouldn't represent much in the way of"people"" coming
together." If empty words would embolden killers, wouldn't turning the
entire United Nations Charter, which forbids unilateral wars of aggression
without Security Council permission, into so much scrap paper be a way of
"emboldening" such killers?
' He also confirmed that Saddam had a -- the ability to produce biological
and chemical weapons. In other words, he was a danger. '
Saddam did not have any stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons at
all, and had no nuclear weapons program. Iraq has the same ability to
produce" chemical weapons" as all other industrializing societies do, no
more and no less. But Iraq did not have such weapons, and it is hardly a
casus belli that they had the potential to make them. So does Brazil, but
we haven't invaded it lately.
' Finally, the attitude of the Iraqis toward the American people -- it's an
interesting question. They're really pleased we got rid of Saddam Hussein. '
About half say the US presence in Iraq is a form of liberation. About half
say it is a form of humiliation..
' And they were happy -- they're not happy they're occupied. I wouldn't be
happy if I were occupied either. They do want us there to help with
security, and that's why this transfer of sovereignty is an important
signal to send, and it's why it's also important for them to hear we will
stand with them until they become a free country. '
What? I thought they were happy. Now you say they aren't happy. Which is it?